


lie me to sleep

by tin_girl



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Angst, I suppose, M/M, Manipulation, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 17:10:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20911169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: “Get out of my sight, Izaya,” Shizuo says, and it’s more plea than threat. “I can’t stand to look at you.”What a shame, Izaya thinks, walking backwards and laughing louder than hyenas, loud enough for birds to startle into flight. What a shame, when all I want is to be looked at.Guilt is eating Shizuo alive, and Izaya wants to be seen more than he wants to be safe, or does he?





	lie me to sleep

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't deal with Izaya and Shizuo's final fight in my other fanfics, because it's so depressing, but this is mostly about its aftermath since I've decided I can't avoid it forever. Still, it's not as drastic as canon, with Izaya back to Ikebukuro and almost as mobile as he was before, because I'm not ready for anything more serious than that yet. 
> 
> Also, you know that song that goes I would do anything for love, but I won't do that? This fic is basically Izaya doing anything for love, including _that_, only refusing to admit it's because of love all the while.

What have we _become_ to each other if not what we’ve _done_ to each other?

~Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Once, Izaya read an article about 40 000 years old flute pieces found at Hohle Fels in Germany, carved from the hollow wing bone of a vulture, and he laughed, spinning in his chair until the whole world was a blur, imagining himself carving the city’s bones in a similar way, for someone else to breathe into, waiting for the song of it.

The article suggested that music might have been the strategic advantage then-humans had over later extinct Neanderthals, and it made sense to Izaya, that bones could be weapons.

When he comes back to Ikebukuro, Shizuo’s not on the streets, as if he’s hiding in shame, and it reminds Izaya of Frankenstein, of how his monstrum would hate himself and keep out of sight. He doesn’t think of how there are no obvious monsters in _Frankenstein_, and he giggles himself to sleep the way he used to do by crying once, back when the twins still wore diapers and they had to heat dinner up on the stove because there was no microwave yet.

Izaya is no bird, but bones don’t have to be hollow to snap in two.

*

When they first meet after, Shizuo is carrying a shopping bag, milk bottles and cigarettes inside as if that’s all he lives on. It’s too mundane, and catches them both off-guard, so that Izaya forgets to smirk in time, and Shizuo drops the bag, glass breaking and a puddle forming on the sidewalk.

Izaya remembers how not all bird bones are hollow, and how Ikebukuro, just like vultures, must have marrow. He can almost recall the taste of it in his mouth, can almost remember how his throat gave way to laughter at the spill of it on his tongue.

There would be bronzed stripes where the t-shirt sleeves never quite reached the end of his casts, only Izaya didn’t ever go out, after, to have the skin there tan, and now that he doesn’t even need bandages, he’s back to coats.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, the way people whisper the names of hurricanes, hiding in their basements to wait it out or pray it away, and why the fuck would Shizuo be the scared one?

Izaya remembers how once he got so drunk on information that he’d talk too loud and grip things too hard until a glass broke in his hand. He thinks of all that blood, and misses the red and the sting of it, something he’d done to himself.

“Shizu-chan,” he says, too happy, the kind of happy that must make it sound sad, and in his veins something boils in excitement when he remembers how between the two of them, they smashed Ikebukuro’s spine to pieces. “Missed me?”

But Shizuo, who’s won the city, looks like he doesn’t want it – staring at Izaya as if they’re in Kiev or Harbin or Havana, somewhere the past shouldn’t follow you, having lost your scent the way police dogs do after well-planned crimes. He looks down at the puddle of milk, helpless, as if he’d clean it up if he knew how, and Izaya remembers Newton’s third law.

How maybe when Shizuo broke Izaya, he broke himself on the hurt, too.

“Izaya,” Shizuo repeats stupidly, staring at his shoes, as if he’s forgotten all the other words, and oh, what a delicious thought that is, and oh, how Izaya hates himself for thinking it, for wanting it to be true.

“Do you see me in your nightmares?” Izaya asks, curious, but Shizuo looks like he never sleeps.

*

When Izaya was younger – still small, really – he saw a boy cry as his blue balloon popped under a red sky.

What are you crying for?, he thought, resentful, because they boy’s mother was holding his hand.

When he was a bit older but still too young, he saw a boy cry as his mother reprimanded him, hisses instead of shouts so as to not draw attention, dragging him by the hand under a yet redder sky.

What are you crying for?, he thought, resentful, because the boy’s mother was holding his hand.

When he was older still and drunk on youth, he saw a boy cry as his mother told him what she’d do to him once they were back home, dragging him by the hand as the sky bled out like a shot animal torso.

All Izaya thought was, humans, and all he did was smile. He didn’t feel anything anymore, he was a kite, he would watch, he would look, he would float.

Shizuo is no human, and Izaya is no god, but not for lack of trying.

*

The next time they meet after, it’s when Izaya – woken from a nightmare about his bones snapping and snapping and snapping, snap in two – breaks into Shizuo’s apartment. It’s easy, the lock shitty and the building without an intercom, and he searches the cupboards for tea but all he finds is instant coffee, instant noodles, and spices that are two years out of date.

It’s never occurred to him that spices of all things could go bad.

Outside the window, the city seems peaceful, thorns up but skin asleep, and Izaya remembers how glorious it looks at night from behind his own windows – like the skirt of that dress with small pieces of amber sewn into the satin that his mother used to wear sometimes, always going out on the rare occasions when she was in town, rushing in to grab a comb and a brooch, kissing them kids goodbye instead of hello.

Sometimes Izaya wonders if he would have turned out different, had he never climbed any roof or rode an elevator to the fifth, sixth, seventh floor.

When Shizuo gets back in the middle of the night, keys loud in the lock like something dying, Izaya is stretched out on his mattress, limbs spread, and getting high on the hate of him that the sheets stink of.

Shizuo swears as he trips on his own shoes, and grabs the doorframe. There is something about how the darkness swallows the sound that makes Izaya want to steal it away from its mouth, and his heart speeds up something scary as he waits for the monster to notice him and stare like he used to back when it was just the two of them and Ikebukuro’s ruined skeleton whining under their feet, sucked clean off marrow and cracked into something almost pretty, like a snow come too early.

Good old times, those.

“Stinks,” Shizuo mumbles, and Izaya grins at that, a smile so big that it’d have to be widened with a knife on someone else’s face. “Izaya?”

He wonders, then, if Shizuo ever smells him when Izaya’s not there.

Once, when Izaya was young enough to fear something other than death, he stretched out on the kitchen floor in the shape of Lucifer after the fall, dozens of knives that he’d bought over months laid out around him blades-up like deadly feathers. _Safe now, _he thought then, _come at me, whoever will dare. Just try and touch me. _

It’s the same now, only on the soft mattress the blades are flat on their sides, as if he’s falling instead of trying to fly.

It’s the best thing he’s ever felt – falling to his death but still alive.

Shizuo stands at the foot of the bed and stares at him, eyes like coins and shoulders slumped as if he’s in love with gravity.

“You should leave,” he says without feeling, and doesn’t throw Izaya out. He drinks some milk and smokes through two cigarettes without turning the light on, moving in the pools of gold from the streetlamps outside, miserable and trapped in light like a Christian painting. Waiting for something exciting to happen – flying furniture, death threats, mouth corners smashed to blood – Izaya falls asleep, and when he wakes at dawn, curled up on his side like something yet to be born, the knives are gone.

All those years ago, when he woke up, they were still there, and blood was oozing from his arm and from between his ribs. In the end, by trying to protect himself, he’d only—

Someone once told him that beauty, most of all, was cruel, and Shizuo’s never been as cruel as the day he broke Izaya’s bones.

Shizuo hands him a cup of coffee, and Izaya holds it in his hands for ten minutes without taking a sip, then empties it into the sink, not because he wants to, but because he _doesn’t_ want to.

“You haven’t changed one bit, have you?” Shizuo mumbles, watching him with hooded eyes as if Izaya’s not worth too much attention. It’s a good thing that he’s taken and hidden Izaya’s knives, because were he to have them in his hands, Izaya would throw them at Shizuo, one by one.

“You, on the other hand, got all boring,” Izaya says, washing the cup.

“Monsters are never boring, are they?” Shizuo says, and smiles, dazed, not at Izaya but at some thought Izaya can’t guess at.

Izaya throws the cup, and Shizuo doesn’t reach out to catch it like he would, once, letting it hit him on the temple and fall to his lap.

“No fun, Shizu-chan,” Izaya laughs – laughs because he’s learned to do it instead of everything else – and remembers how that day, there was something lovely about the crack of his own bones. Some relief, even, _just try to touch me_ and Shizuo did, it was done, it was over, it was in the past even as it was still in the present, and the past might have been a god, but it was the sort that slept if you prayed to it.

Something lovely about it, Shizuo breaking him like he was just another of Ikebukuro’s streetlamps.

An evolution, if you will. Break me till you change me, change me till you make me.

“It was never fun, before,” Shizuo says, sprawled out on the windowsill as if he could slide off it any moment and fall the three stories down.

_Liar. _

“Then why did you use to smile?” Izaya says, and remembers their grins like watermelon-piece skins, how the world would end sooner than they would end each other.

“Madness is not happiness, Izaya,” Shizuo says, and Izaya laughs and laughs and laughs, because he wouldn’t know.

*

Sometimes, at night – because when he’s trying to fall asleep, he can’t busy himself with other things – Izaya thinks of Shizuo the way some think of paintings. Something that they don’t dare wanting to have, something they wish they could touch.

The broken bones grown back stronger, those long, long bones, and a forever of soul in his eyes.

3 am is when Izaya can’t pretend that Shizuo doesn’t have a soul – not even to himself.

*

Shizuo looks at him like there’s no one else in the world, and it doesn’t matter that in a moment he’ll break Izaya’s bones, because there is nothing better than being reflected in Shizuo’s eyes. It feels like Izaya’s all that matters, and he could get drunk on it, get high on it, get off on it, get killed by it and die laughing all the while, even though any other death would have him cry.

To have Shizuo’s absolute attention, like there’s not even Ikebukuro in the background, like the world is but a passport photo of Izaya, is intoxicating in a way only religion can be, and if it kills Izaya, so be it. He’s toyed with death all his life, climbing up on rooftops, lying to yakuza, juggling information instead of keeping it in his pockets, but it’s never felt quite like this, champagne in his veins and Shizuo’s attention on him like Izaya’s a forest fire.

Later, it will get scary, and real, and bones will break with the sound of forgotten, half-stale crackers, and Izaya will love it, but he’ll hate it more. Later, he’ll be scared, and he’ll remember that knives can’t save him when he sleeps, and isn’t fighting with Shizuo a sweet sort of sleep? Later, he’ll want Shizuo to kill him and then regret it.

Regret it, like Izaya’s something to be missed.

Later yet, he will hide and heal, two steps forward, two steps back, days stretched into something lazy and lonely, chess pieces gathering dust and no monster breath on his neck, the only thing that ever felt warm gone.

But just then, it’s lovely like a psalm, and he can’t bear the thought of Shizuo looking away, even if it meant Izaya would be saved.

*

The next time, he doesn’t break in. Instead, he waits across the street from some seedy bar where Shizuo is trying to drink himself happy, and, sunset desperate like a Monet canvas, counts the minutes backwards. When the monster stumbles out – Shizuo, Shizuo, Shizuo, Izaya’s blood screaming, yelling, _howling_ – Izaya grins and waves his fingers.

“No,” Shizuo says, staring at him like Izaya’s a ghost.

“Don’t,” he says, all frantic, all panicked, lips still alcohol-wet and eyes like he’s a deer with its leg caught in a jaw-trap.

“Just leave me alone, will you?” he says, and Izaya shivers, because he has a feeling that were a car to crash into a building nearby, Shizuo wouldn’t look away from him anyway.

“Are you scared of me?” Izaya asks, even though monsters can’t be scared, and around them the city is crying as if one of them has died and the streets can’t stand it.

“No,” Shizuo says, and pushes his hands into his hair. “I’m only scared of myself.”

“Ah, checkmate!” God, but he hasn’t played chess in a while. “Guilt doesn’t suit you, Shizu-chan. You’re not pretty enough for it.”

Shizuo crosses the street towards him and grabs Izaya by the collar. Soon, Izaya is yanked up, feet dangling, and under the spike of panic and the memory of all of him cracking like an old building that no one’d bothered to renovate in a long while, there’s familiar excitement flooding him like something biblical.

There are dozens of knives, big and small, hidden in the folds of his clothes, up his sleeves, kept in place by the waistband of his pants, folded in his pockets – and oh, how many pockets he has! – one secured by a sock to the inside of his ankle, but he doesn’t reach for any of them, curling his hands over the strain of Shizuo’s knuckles around his collar instead.

“Just leave me the fuck alone, flea, and I’ll leave you the fuck alone, and we can just stay the fuck away from each other—”

But Izaya’s too busy choking for air in Shizuo’s eyes to listen, watching himself reflected in them from up close and drowning, drowning, drowning like Narcissus did—

Only it’s not himself he loves.

“I missed this,” he says, and remembers the months of not being looked at, of the world turning without any care of how the motion kept throwing him off-kilter. “How I missed this.”

He reaches up to touch Shizuo, not quite sure why, his fingertips hungry for something, and when his sleeve rides down, Shizuo stares at his arm, bent awkwardly, nearly but not quite right.

“I almost killed you,” he says, slowly, as if delirious, and drops Izaya.

“I almost killed you first,” Izaya says, and smiles like nothing’s changed.

“I didn’t want to do this to you,” Shizuo whispers, eyes lost, fingers closing on nothing, breath all cheap beer, and he looks so human that for a second Izaya is scared he’ll be like everyone else. “I never wanted for this to happen.”

“You fool,” Izaya says. “It should have been so much worse. We were supposed to kill each other for real.”

He imagines it for a moment, their bodies curled together like two commas, battered but close. Even dead, for a while, Shizuo would be warm.

“Get out of my sight, Izaya,” Shizuo says, and it’s more plea than threat. “I can’t stand to look at you.”

What a shame, Izaya thinks, walking backwards and laughing louder than hyenas, loud enough for birds to startle into flight. What a shame, when all I want is to be looked at.

*

Sometimes, he wakes up with his bones aching, and remembers Shizuo’s impossible anger until he throws up, crawling on the bathroom tiles, forehead on the edge of the toilet seat.

All the knives in the world couldn’t protect him, and Izaya smiles wryly, because now that he’s almost died, there’s no use in trying to keep himself safe. Now he’s walked himself out of hell without daring to look back at himself and have it ruined, even Shizuo won’t touch him.

Shizuo, who already has.

He laughs, because it was a lyre that Orpheus played Cerberus to sleep with, but Izaya’s sure a flute would do, too. After all, what better way to distract a dog than to have it gnaw on a bone?

*

Shinra traces the line of Izaya’s forearm with his finger, and clicks his tongue.

“Bad job, this,” he says, and Izaya wants to kill him for all the parties he hasn’t invited him to, and all the wounds he hasn’t patched up for him. “You’re such a mess.”

“I like to think of it as a sort of _kintsugi_,” Izaya says, and Shinra sighs like an exasperated parent. Izaya’s had enough of those – concerned, but always a little too late.

“I wish you’d let the city sleep and stay safe,” Shinra tells him, patting his arm and dropping it like Izaya’s a ragdoll. “You’d think what happened would change things—”

“Only nothing changed,” Izaya mumbles, because he still doesn’t get invited to parties, because Shinra still only patches him up half the time, because Shizuo still won’t look at him unless Izaya makes him. “Nothing ever changes, does it? Even though it should.”

He doesn’t stay for tea, and Shinra doesn’t insist. Nobody ever does, but then, Izaya should be happy people don’t kick him out the door, he supposes.

He doesn’t think of how Shizuo collected all his knives as he slept instead of throwing him out, because he’s sure that letting himself think that it was to prevent Izaya from hurting himself would hurt more than any blade ever could.

*

He didn’t know Shizuo yet, back when Izaya still believed in monsters under beds and maybe that’s for the better, because he wouldn’t stand the disappointment of checking under his own and not finding Shizuo there.

*

The twins come see him, once. He can hear Mairu chattering in the hall, and when her fist starts banging on the door, he slides down to the floor with his back to it and pretends he’s not there.

“Fine!” she yells after a few minutes, while Izaya’s trying to breathe in before breathing out instead of the other way around. “We hate you, anyway!”

When they leave, he counts to a hundred and doesn’t fall apart.

*

The next time Izaya sees Shizuo, the monster is laughing, sharing sushi with Tom and the Russian girl, and oh, how Izaya hates him.

What happened to all the guilt?

He watches them through the window, and Shizuo never notices him, never glances his way no matter how wide Izaya smiles. After, Izaya walks the streets with hands in his pockets and fingers tight around the handles of his knives, itching for something, tired inside his own skin.

Being himself always seemed like a fair price for not wanting things that would ruin him but here he is, wanting and ruined anyway.

He breaks into Shizuo’s apartment again and when he hangs his coat next to Shizuo’s own, he smells cheap cigarettes and June. He makes himself coffee, pours Shizuo’s milk down the drain out of spite, and busies himself with looking through the apartment. The place, much like his own, is mostly devoid of personal possessions, all bartender suits, mismatched socks and old cooking and driving magazines even though Shizuo doesn’t do either.

Lonely, he thinks, and wraps Shizuo’s blanket around himself because it smells of sweat and blood and the end of the world. He brings the corner of it to his mouth and chews on it, remembering how Shizuo laughed just two hours before.

After Shizuo broke his bones, Izaya expected him to track him down and finish what he started, and it was a disappointment in a way, how he never did.

When Shizuo gets back, he hesitates in the doorway, and Izaya can hear him sniff. He laughs, bubbly and loud, and God, maybe they wouldn’t all try to kill him every time he looks at someone funny if he didn’t laugh so.

There’s a sound like a smothered whimper and then Shizuo slides down to the floor, slumped like a pile of unwanted clothes.

“I told you to leave me alone, didn’t I?” he says, a kind of hysteria in his voice. In the dark his eyes are wide like a child’s, and what a strange thought, a small Shizuo, not Izaya’s yet, bones still normal, a room full of toys. “I _told_ you.”

Izaya leans over him and smiles as wide as it goes, because he doesn’t know how not to anymore.

“When my bones cracked, did you enjoy the sound?” he taunts, like spilling salt on writhing slugs. “It was quite satisfying, wasn’t it, crack, crack, crack, just like when you crush ice—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut _up_—”

“Crack, crack, _crack_, snapped right in two—”

“Izaya, just—”

“You must have loved how the bones crunched, didn’t you just lo—”

Shizuo reaches out to fold a hand over Izaya’s mouth, and the world stops. Izaya stares at him and brings his own hand up, fitting his fingertips to Shizuo’s knuckles, scraped by indebted scum’s teeth, and he smiles, knowing Shizuo must feel it against his skin. Shizuo stares at him, and he looks dazed and drugged, as if he’s only half there, and Izaya can’t have that, so he reaches out to tug on Shizuo’s bowtie, and when that doesn’t get him a reaction, he curls his hand around Shizuo’s neck, fists the sweaty hair at his nape and tugs.

“Shizu-chan has eyelashes like a girl,” he says, just to say something, and Shizuo seems to snap out of it, hand falling away from Izaya’s mouth, only it confuses Izaya and he leans forward chasing the touch until Shizuo’s palm is folded between their lips and their noses bump. It must look like Shizuo’s preventing Izaya from kissing him, and Izaya laughs and laughs against his skin, the bowtie worked loose and tangled in his fingers.

Shizuo says his name like he’s begging for Izaya to leave him alone, and Izaya remembers how sometimes, after retrieving his dirty knives, he’d smell the blood and then wipe it off with handkerchiefs he’d keep for months instead of throwing them away.

It must have started back in high school, and isn’t that the funniest? He was supposed to be _smart._

“If you killed me now, I wouldn’t mind,” he mumbles into Shizuo’s palm, so that it’s his now, a gift of a sort and everyone knows it’s rude to get rid of those. “Only go for the neck this time, and do it fast, before someone saves us.”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Shizuo says, hopeless like a kid that tore off a doll’s head, and Izaya has the bowtie wrapped around Shizuo’s wrist by now, so he tugs on it until Shizuo’s hand falls down and their lips fold together. Shizuo’s eyes regain focus, no milk, and Izaya thinks that it’s like falling to his death but still alive yet again. He smiles into the kiss – though it feels too awkward and coincidental to be one – only under his lips Shizuo’s mouth is all scabs and flakes of skin, chewed-on the way dogs gnaw on bones, and it’s the strangest thing, a monster hurting himself in such a human way.

Izaya bites down, opening a barely closed wound, and he laughs around the spill of Shizuo’s blood on his own lip. What a wonder, that touch would feel better than looking.

“Of course you don’t want to kill me,” he whispers, and smooths his thumb over the bite. “After all, you already have.”

Finally, like the click of a lighter, rage floods Shizuo’s face, and by the time he stumbles to his feet, Izaya is already tripping backwards, half joy, half fear, his mangled bones begging him to run away and his veins singing for old times, nothing but him in Shizuo’s world again and the threat of the price he’ll have to pay for it already on his lips if he bothered to lick them and have a taste.

They tumble into the living room and Shizuo throws a lamp, Izaya’s heart in his throat because it can’t be like old times after all, pain in his legs and feet tripping on the carpet, hell about to swallow him yet again, only the lamp crashes into a wall and not anywhere near him. Izaya stops, and watches Shizuo throw shoes, smash plates, and break furniture, chair legs scattered around him like an earthquake aftermath, and only the space where he’s standing left alone like the eye of a storm. Shizuo rips a curtain, flings a remote control, pushes a dresser so that drawers fall out and crash to the floor, underwear spilling, everything loud until he punches a hole in the window and the world goes quiet.

By the time Shizuo flexes his hand, pieces of glass stuck in his skin, Izaya has long forgotten to be scared.

“I wish I’d never met you,” Shizuo whines, cradling his hand. “I wish you’d never met me,” he adds, staring at Izaya like there’s too much wrong between them to ever try and make it right, and he leaves the apartment before Izaya can tell him that he’s never wanted right anyway.

Shizuo, destroying everything in sight just to keep himself from destroying Izaya.

The debris of the apartment around him, everything broken but his bones still whole, the small space where Izaya’s standing feels safer than being surrounded by knives ever did, and he crumples to the ground and lies down on the floor, dragging his limbs up and down like when you make a snow angel. His fingers don’t even graze any of the broken chair pieces, and he laughs and laughs and laughs the night away and he thinks that he’ll always be safe now, because Heiwajima Shizuo wants him so.

It feels better than knives, and it feels better than love.

It even feels better than being seen.

*

“You’re like a carousel, you know,” Kadota tells him when they bump into each other on the street and Izaya convinces him to get a drink together. “First it’s all fun and games, and everyone likes carousels, anyway, only it never stops with you. You keep spinning and spinning, and there’s no getting off.”

“How mean!” Izaya laughs, and Kadota hasn’t even asked him about his arms. “Broken things stop!”

“Only until they’re repaired, though,” Kadota says, and Izaya is having so much fun that he buys him another drink, even though nothing is really fun these days besides having Shizuo look at him and not being carved into flutes.

*

Days pass, and Izaya can’t stand how there’s no aftertaste of blood on his tongue anymore, and no debris around him, so he goes looking for Shizuo, only one knife hidden up his sleeve. When he finds him, he’s smoking a cigarette with his back to the wall and unseeing eyes.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, and he hates how starved he sounds. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Shizuo looks at him like Izaya’s an apocalypse and it’s too late to stop it, given up and not bothering to put his cigarette out. It makes Izaya feel disgusting, like any moment now, no matter how much he doesn’t want to, he’ll start begging Shizuo for something and like when that happens, Shizuo might refuse to give it to him.

“Aren’t you tired of this, Izaya?” Shizuo says, as if they should have grown up or grown out of each other, as if it’s as easy as cutting one’s vein to ease the pressure by letting the blood trickle out.

“No,” Izaya mumbles, and feels small, suddenly, but goes on pretending to be big. “I haven’t had nearly enough yet.”

He stares at Shizuo’s lips bitten red anew and hates himself for wondering what made him mangle them so, and if it hurts. He’s never wondered that about anyone before, not like this.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Shizuo says, staring at his feet. “It’s insulting to apologize to ghosts.”

Izaya stares at him, and for the first time in months, he doesn’t remember how to laugh.

“Oh, I’ll show you how alive I am,” he promises, and bites his own lip to blood, teeth too sharp for the excitement of it all. “Just wait, and I’ll show you.”

*

Simon drops a heavy hand on his shoulder from behind, once, and Izaya yelps and falls out of his chair, heart in his mouth.

Simon helps him to his feet, frowning in concern, and because he never mentions how much he’s shaking, Izaya leaves him a generous tip after.

*

Someone stabs Shizuo, deeper than usual, blood trail all over Ikebukuro like something Izaya could follow and save him, only he’s no good at putting things back together.

He’s only good at ruin and so he ruins all the idiots who thought they could lay a finger on Shizuo and get away with it. He’s a bit rusty, but a word here and a phone call there do the trick, and he doesn’t have to watch the delinquents’ lives go up in flames to smell the smoke. He tears the papers he’s gathered on them to pieces and throws them up in the air to have them float down towards him like confetti, and Shizuo won’t know about this, but Izaya buys him a celebratory champagne, anyway.

When he stores it in one of Shizuo’s cupboards, he notes that the living room window is still broken. He wonders if Shizuo, for all his warmth, gets cold at night, and pays someone to come and repair it.

“I still hate you,” he whispers to no one, fastening the stolen bowtie around his neck and smiling at his reflection in the mirror. “I hate you so much.”

He doesn’t think of how he cares about Shizuo now, because even if he hadn’t made sure to never care for anything in his life in his early teens, he’d have care beaten out of him by now anyway.

*

The next time he wakes up from a nightmare about his bones breaking, he’s soaked with sweat but he doesn’t throw up. He thinks it’s a good thing, because his body hurts too much to crawl to the bathroom, anyway.

*

So much has happened to him already, and he’s met so many of his precious humans, but his life as Izaya thinks of it is still divided into befores and afters by the first time he laid eyes on Shizuo.

“It’s a shame you two didn’t meet before you decided everyone was a frog to dissect,” Shinra told him once, cupping Izaya’s cheek with his palm in a rare show of affection. It felt strange there, plastic, like a theatre prop. “It would have been so much easier for you.”

“What would?” Izaya asked, and Shinra smiled as if not telling him was merciful.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed, anyway,” he said, already getting busy with something else, his back t towards Izaya. “Stranger things have happened, after all.”

Now, years later, Izaya drinks himself to understanding it at last, a half-empty vodka bottle on his desk, and remembers how he wanted Shizuo dead so that he wouldn’t have anyone and so that nobody would have him.

But what if _I_ could have you?, he thinks, and tugs at one of the handkerchiefs stained with Shizuo’s blood with his teeth. What if we didn’t have to be dead?

Once, he used to dream of being something like a Greek god, immortal but not exactly, petty and imperfect but having the Trojan war soldiers for chess pieces anyway. Now he knows he’s just human, it’s easier to let himself have the things humans want and think of a chessboard as something he can walk all over to be killed or to survive, to lose or to win.

“Shizu-chan,” he chirps, dragging the monster into a dark corner by the wrist. “Shizu-can, Shizu-chan, Shizu-chan—”

“What the fuck do you want?” Shizuo growls and when Izaya kisses him it’s like he always imagined stepping off a rooftop edge would feel.

“You’re such a fool, Namie told him when she caught him toying with Shizuo’s bowtie and he didn’t tell her that foolish things felt the best because he didn’t know it yet.

Now he knows.

Shizuo says his name like when people ask for rain, and Izaya imagines it fitted into all the empty boxes in a crossword book. He melts in Shizuo’s hands until there’s no bones for him to break, even if he tried.

“How long have you wanted this, anyway?” he asks, and Shizuo says never, says always, says I don’t know, says shut up, says Izaya, says I can’t hurt you anymore, says I can’t I can’t I can’t, says please don’t make me hurt you again, says when I dream it’s always you spitting blood, says your arms, says, Izaya, Izaya, Izaya, Izaya, Izaya—

“Without you, the streets felt cold,” he whimpers into Izaya’s forehead, and Izaya kisses his neck, drunk, drunk, drunk, safe. “Everything felt cold, and now it’s—”

“You should have killed me when you had the chance, Shizu-chan,” Izaya hums against his skin, and Shizuo pushes him away, eyes wide.

“I—” he starts, wrapping his arms around himself. “I don’t want to touch you ever again.”

For a moment Izaya feels something curiously similar to a death inside himself, like a baby bird pushed out of the nest never spreading its wings, plummeting to its death.

“I don’t want to hurt you ever again,” Shizuo adds, then, and Izaya wants to tell him that when you hurt something, it ends up different, not worse, but he doesn’t think Shizuo would understand. “It makes me sick.”

“I’m alive in spite of you,” Izaya says, but Shizuo’s already gone, and all Izaya has for a kiss is his half-crushed cigarette left on the ground. He gnaws on it as he calls Shiki, and he can already feel his bones hating him for what he’s about to do. He tastes the dirt from the sole of Shizuo’s shoe, and it delights him how he doesn’t deserve anything better but will get it anyway.

*

When he comes over to Shinra’s apartment, eager to get it right, Celty asks him why she should do anything for him. He almost says that he’ll pay her, only he catches Shinra’s eye across the room and remembers how he’s curious to see if Shinra will care at all.

“See, it wouldn’t be for me,” Izaya says, and when he smiles, it’s sharper than ever. “It’s a small favor, anyway, Setton-san.”

Later, Shinra stares at him like Izaya’s lost his mind, but for better or for worse, his mind is all Izaya has left.

*

The next time Izaya breaks into Shizuo’s apartment, he stuffs some of his clothes in the spare cupboard drawer and hides a toothbrush in a nook behind the sink. By the time Shizuo gets back, he’s curled up under his blanket, counting himself asleep.

“There’s just no getting rid of you, is there?” Shizuo sighs, and pushes his fingers into his hair.

“You said it was cold without me.”

“Nowhere near as cold as you looked that day,” Shizuo says, shaking his head. “Cold, and pathetic, and miserable, and _small._”

“The way you see me has nothing to do with who I am,” Izaya says, a knife blade pressed to Shizuo’s neck, and Shizuo arches towards it even though Izaya was never going to break the skin. “It’s all about who you are.”

He kisses Shizuo’s shoulder before he can push Izaya away and lets himself out. He doesn’t laugh, because they’ll laugh plenty after.

*

He’s drinking a milkshake when they come for him, and it’s strawberry all over his shirt as someone slaps tape over his mouth and someone else bends his arms back until he remembers how much they still hurt sometimes.

Soon after, he’s tied to a chair in some shabby apartment with stains on the carpet and a bowl of long rotten fruit on a dusty table, the barrel of a gun under his chin. He tilts his head back and laughs as someone kicks him in the face because he knows that, somewhere, his phone must be pinging.

It’s scary at first, something crunching, his skin ripping as if he really is a kite after all and made of paper, and for a moment he remembers not being able to get up and go to the bathroom, no one there to help him for hours on end until he’d wet his pants, but then he hears a door kicked open downstairs and thinks that soon, Ikebukuro will go back to being something he watches over instead of something he has to crawl out of.

Shizuo doesn’t kill them when he shoves the door open, too busy staring at Izaya and mumbling his name as he pats down his body as gently as he can, checking for broken bones.

“I’m alive,” Izaya tells him, pushing Shizuo’s hair back and there are those eyes, nothing in them but Izaya. For the first time ever, it occurs to him that in his own, there must be nothing but Shizuo, and he thinks he’ll learn to survive it somehow. “I’m alive, Shizu-chan.”

“Why is there blood? Izaya, where is the blood coming from—"

“I’m alive in spite of you, and, now, thanks to you.”

Shizuo was raised on milk but when he coughs out a relieved breath, Izaya knows that atonement must taste so much sweeter.

*

Izaya tests the strings, tugs on them to see if they’ll snap from misuse, and blackmails silence out of everyone. Celty yells and throws vegetables straight out of a shopping bag at him, and Shinra says that, one day, he’ll have to tell Shizuo, but Izaya has read too many stories to believe that anything in life will end like one.

“I’m just glad they didn’t kill me,” he whines into the phone on Shinra’s balcony, Ikebukuro back under his shoe and Shizuo somewhere in it, all his.

“I told them to not overdo it,” Shiki says, and Izaya laughs, the stitches on his face stretching painfully. He doesn’t mind much – later in the afternoon, he’ll be at Shizuo’s, where there’s already his favorite tea in one of the kitchen cupboards, and Shizuo will touch it better. Later still, they’ll lie together in the quiet space left amongst the ruin of all the things they’ve done to each other, safe.

And if he wakes up from nightmares in which his ribs break like matches, what of it when Shizuo’s right there, asleep and dreaming of killing everyone who ever dares touch Izaya again? In the end, Izaya's done a fair share of selling and buying, and stifling his panicked cries with a pillow so as to not wake Shizuo up seems a fair price for getting to keep him at all, like a myth that might end well.

A bone flute of a thing.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear, sometime soon I will write a fanfiction about the two of them inspired by Murakami and not western mythology but for now, here we are with this mess of Orpheus and Eurydice references. 
> 
> Anyway, thank you so much for reading! I hope you liked it and feedback is very welcome <3
> 
> Also, you can find me on tumblr @yoyointhegarden :))


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